June 09, 2005

Defining success #3 - Time abundance

I didn't fully realize how important time is to me until just recently.

In the past, back when I still thought I was destined to climb the corporate ladder, I was a workaholic. I wore it like a badge of honor. I went through a period of time when I regularly worked 70 - 80 hour weeks. In my mind, that's what you did to be successful. First one in the office, last one (by far) to go home. Work, work, work.

I didn't realize until just recently that this old belief was still having an impact on me.

Over the last few years I've grappled with a fear of success. In a recent conversation with a friend, I realized that fear has its roots in an outdated, unconscious belief of what success means and what it has to look like.

That belief says that if I got really successful, I would have to live this unbalanced, over-committed life again. And that's something I absolutely DO NOT want to go back to.

The funny thing is that I didn't even realize that old belief was there.

My friend suggested that perhaps I needed to come up with a new picture of success. Since a big part of my fear of success centered around a feared loss of time to live my non-work life, I realized that I needed to incorporate that into my vision of what success would look like.

So in my definition of success, time abundance plays a key role. I want to have time to live the full scope of my life in 360 degrees, not just work.

It's funny how, reframing it like that, the fear of success begins to melt away.

This is one of a series of posts exploring my definition for
success in my own journey. You can see the original post with the big
picture here.